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By Root 2052 0

and Denmark under one house, not only through fighting, but also through marrying and making treaties, and there were Germans and Danes overrunning everything in the north—no northern men did anything but sit at their farms, plotting against the queen, but indeed, the farms were so emptied out from the Great Death, that all these men could do was plot, for there were no armies to be made—all the peasants were in the fields, tilling, sowing, and reaping as hard as they could—and asking high wages to do it. What about the pope of Jerusalem, said the Greenlanders. The Icelanders greeted this with perplexity—were not two popes sufficient? But indeed, there had been a great conqueror in the east, by the name of Timur the Ferocious. After putting great cities to the sword, cities such as Damascus, where St. Paul received the Lord, and Baghdad, this demon would hitch a hundred beautiful maidens to his golden chariot and whip the clothing off them so that they pulled him until they dropped dead. And this was the least of the horrors he perpetrated. But there was no pope in Jerusalem. And folk said that this Timur had himself died not so long ago. It seemed a great thing to Jon Andres Erlendsson to have these Icelanders at his wedding, a good sign of what was to come. He set their gifts right beside those he had given Helga and those she had given to him.

Now the time came for the procession to the church, and Helga was brought out of one of the smaller rooms of the steading, and she wore only this, a simple robe of rich weaving, of a green color, decorated with white tablet weaving, and also a silver circlet around her head that was the bridal crown in the Ketils Stead lineage, and Gunnar held her by the arm, and when they came near to Jon Andres Erlendsson, he felt her jerk away from him, but not meaning to, only called out of herself by the presence of the husband she was about to take, and this movement of hers filled Gunnar with pleasure. Now the bride and groom went up beside one another, and began to walk through the valley to the church, and all the folk who had been invited to the feast walked behind them. The air was still and the sun shone brightly on the late summer green of the fields, and as Gunnar watched the backs of these two heads, his daughter and his former enemy, it seemed to him that he had shed the capacity of enmity itself, that he was preserved forevermore from acts of revenge. The groom turned his curly head and smiled upon the bride, who turned and smiled back at him, and Gunnar whispered to Birgitta, “This cub cannot be of the Ketils Stead lineage, but must be of the angels, for he has cast away the Greenlander’s greatest pleasure, which is doing injury to those who have injured you.”

Birgitta leaned toward him and cupped her ear, and he only said, “All signs seem favorable to me.” And soon the bridal couple were at the church door, where they knelt and received Sira Pall Hallvardsson’s blessing, then went inside for the mass and the wedding service. Jon Andres’ servants had decorated the church with branches of birch and willow scrub, and many seal oil lamps burnt brightly about the walls. Afterward they returned for the feast, and folk marveled at the variety of viands, more at one time than most folk might see in a year, and this was the doing of Birgitta Lavransdottir, old and bent as she was. The feast went on for two days after the bedding of the bride, and then the time for the autumn seal hunt drew on, and the feast formed the substance of much of the talk on the seal hunt, the feast and the coming of the Icelanders, whom everyone wanted to catch sight of and hear about.

The leader of this ship was a man named Snorri Torfason, and he was a slight man compared to the Greenlanders, wiry and nearly bald, although folk said that he was but a young man, only thirty-five winters in age. He was quiet-spoken, almost sullen, folk said, but his ship was large and well fitted out. Those he had with him paid attention when he spoke, and looked to him in all things. There were six women on the ship, two